A system of beliefs

23 May 2005

Page & Park’s second Maggie’s centre is a revolution for the practice. Informed as much by the Charles Jencks’ landscape as the spirit of his late wife, Maggie, Prospect finds a human interest story behind the symbolism.

ONE of the criticism’s thrown att the Scottish Parliament is that it is overburdened by its own rhetoric. Standing in the tiny garden of the oncology department of Raighmore Hospital, in Inverness, looking across at the north elevation of the latest signature in the Maggie’s Centres series you see a building that looks literally overburdened. Although it’s no surprise that a Maggie’s Centre should have an exuberant form, it’s still something of a surprise that Page and Park should have produced one. This is the second building the architects have completed for Maggie’s Centre. The other, in Glasgow, is a renovation of an old lodge building, a design which searches out every last available space within a given confine.

Putting aside the more feminine curves of Page and Park’s University of Dundee project and their proposal for a tower on Buchanan Street, the sheer exuberance of their second Maggie’s Centre is still unexpected. David Page stresses that his practice were “juxtaposing free-er geometries with more rigid ones in the mid 90s” and that “the practice is now realising the potential of using richer geometries but the embryo of if has been there for a while.” Yes, Loch Lomond Shores is cylindrical but it is a static, protective form, suggesting alternative perspectives rather than movement itself. Here, the spiral of the copper-clad, main ring beam spirals outwards over supports slanted at ten degrees from the perpendicular.

In plan, this central twist is powerful, intriguing. From the western approach, the first curve of the spiral forms an elegant prow. From the garden of the oncology department garden, however, the building looks like a tugboat about to run aground on one of two large green reefs. For a moment, and it is only a moment, the dynamic central curl, which whips through the rest of this building, appears to be out of control. A Maggie’s Centre is supposed to be an environment that actively encourages a positive attitude among cancer patients to their illness. Is this Maggie’s Centre, one wonders, making too much effort?
Looking at the building in relation to the two landforms, it is clear where the encouragement for this formal extravagance came. The two vesicas, which form the bulk of the landscaping, are veritable Charles Jencks signatures and cover a greater surface area than the centre itself. From the hearth area inside the centre, or from the patio on to which it leads, it is clear they share a strong formal relationship. In plan it is clear that they also share a united symbolic purpose. The eye-shape of the Centre itself is mirrored by the perimeter wall of an enclosed garden and suggests a dividing cell. Further to the west, the two vesica-shaped landforms represent the next stage in the healthy subdivision.

According to David Page, the idea for collaboration was theirs. “The original brief was to do a pavilion at the front of Raighmore Hospital and the landscaping wasn’t part of it. We thought it was a superb opportunity to work with Charles so we asked him. The collaboration actually came from our invitation. We did the building and he did the landscape, although his enthusiasm, his brilliance, inevitably sparked us. That started a long collaboration. He changed his landscape and Andy adapted our design. There was an amazing dialogue and the building evolved out of that. His unwillingness to accept anything that was limited for us was a wonderful process. The constraints of time and money are normally self limiting,” he said. “The form was agreed upon between us very early on and fortunately the planners were amenable,” says Andy Batemen, project architect.

It is odd that Jencks has not made a greater visual impact on the Maggie’s Centres building programme already. He is, of course not just an architect and critic but the widower of Maggie Keswick Jencks, the organisation’s founder. Maggie’s have put his impressive book of contacts to use but until now his landscaping skills have been underused. Although there is a tiny garden in the first Maggie’s Centre, in Edinburgh, the DNA sculpture at Glasgow is hemmed in. In Dundee, the view is dramatic enough in itself: the foliage of trees slipping away to the Firth of Tay. There is a plan for a second phase of landscaping around a specially commissioned Anthony Gormley sculpture but funds are not yet in place for it.

In Inverness the landscaping is integral to the whole design. “Landscaping is normally the first thing to be cost engineered out of a project, whereas here it was held on to. That’s just so pleasing,” said Bateman. The dialogue that led to this place-making has been captured in the building. From the seating in the hearth area, out across the wooden decking, the undulation of the two-stepped forms is graceful. “We wanted to be sure that wherever you were in the building you were aware of the spiral,” said Bateman of the building. The best way to see the building is to look over or through the vessica and vice versa

The relationship of the forms with the rest of the world however, is another matter. Standing on top of a three-metre high mound looking into a busy car park is not the best way to feel supported it has to be said. It makes you feel rather vulnerable. Even as a supposedly able-bodied individual, one feels exposed climbing these spiralled forms while on the other side of the car park the tough business of healthcare goes on. Having said that, the area ring-fenced by the rough larch fence has the potential for future development as a garden. One could imagine a bench and some flowers here; something intimate and conventional, somewhere that was relaxing to actually be in as well as look at. Some chance.

Maggie Keswick Jencks own negative experiences of the built environment as a cancer patient is still the mainspring of the building programme. “Waiting areas could finish you off,” she heads one section of A View From The Frontline, an essay she wrote on her own experiences of cancer. The four-point original programme was devised by Laura Lee, along with Maggie Keswick Jencks, and has remained unchanged since that time. They wanted information, relaxation and stress management, emotional support, “within a thoughtfully designed environment that conveys respect and support for the individual.”

Yet the interior of the Inverness Centre must surely be the most pleasing of all the centres. It is certainly where this building makes a huge statement in support of the claim, central to the Maggie’s Centres project, that the built environment can improve your health. From the door one passes into a small vestibule whose supporting pillars are clad in the same oxidised copper that surrounds the doors and windows frames. It gives way on to an almost complete appreciation of the full interior. To the left is the kitchen, a long bar which ends in a glass window and door. The kitchen is where Maggie’s Centres begin. Informal spaces, lined with every kind of tea under the sun. The spiral begins here, and swoops above the door and on upwards over the hearth area.

It carries on over the larger group room, which is created by sliding two panelled partitions to neat apexes. Then on over three more intimate counselling rooms and round towards you again, to form the side wall of an upper mezzanine level office. Given how rammed the Glasgow Centre is with fundraising staff, this is an embarrassment of space. Perhaps because it is so empty, organisers are planning to add sofas for more intrepid users to sit in. The whole space however, is warm, gentle and light. There isn’t the heavy symbolism of the Jencks landscaping, but a sense of calm. The hardwood floor – FSC jatoba – and birch plywood panelling helps soften the extravagant spiral into a warm embrace on the interior. Does it actually make you feel better? Well, that’s a question of faith.

Those who are in search of meaning will find it outside in the flash cut strips of chips and grass that start between the mounds and span towards the building. These represent a signal important to cell balance known as the long, or endocrine signal. The white pathways of the mounds (signalling to themselves) are known as the autocrine. This is, for instance, a T-cell telling itself to divide. Communication between cells, the constant chatter, is a path to health. The seats at the end of the spiral path are inscribed with, what Jencks calls “ambigrammi”, that challenge the eye and mind to find meaning in them.
“I don’t think it’s important that symbolic significance is understood,” said David Page. “In one way it’s just a construct for us to work around, a story to give our project purpose.” This isn’t entirely true. Research by the medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky provides fundamental support to the Maggie’s Centres programme. “We are coming to understand health not as the absence of disease, but rather as the process by which individuals maintain their sense of coherence, i.e. sense that life is comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful, and ability to function in the face of changes in themselves and their relationships with their environment.”

It is odd that Jencks has not done more landscaping on his wife’s projects. His insistence that the search for iconic architecture is caused by a collapse of religious values is a compelling one. His insistence that we look for solutions in the natural world is less so. Here, however, the surfeit of symbolic significance in the landscaping could provide cancer sufferers with meaning at a time when this sense of coherence is under attack. Yet the demands placed on the Maggie’s Centres are always going to make for strange architecture. On one hand, it is just a place to have a cup of tea before you face harsher surroundings. On another, it is supposed to make people with cancer feel better.

Extravagance of form is not ultimately about carrying through the symbolism of nature to the user. What it does instead is enforce the human story behind the building; the life-affirming story of Maggie and her husband, the critic and architect. If I were to use this building during difficult times I think I would feel, “well, if they believed in this thing enough to actually build it, why can’t I?” The catchment area for the Inverness Maggie’s Centre is the size of Belgium. (Although the terrain is obviously more Highlands than Low Countries.) There, one can find some of the most profoundly striking landscape in the world. Sitting at the hearth in the Maggie’s Centre, looking out at the landforms one cannot help but find the centre uplifting and inspiring for its human endeavour, even for its failings, rather than for the symbolism of nature enshrined within its singular forms.

The desire to revamp palliative care did not begin with Maggie Jencks. It is not strange to hear of healthcare professionals who work in hospices which were founded with an ethos of homely care lose their homely feel for a clinical one. It is not surprising that another generation of cancer workers should create environments that this will never happen to. For better or worse, Maggie’s Centre in Inverness will always be homely.